The Devil's Elixir

More gunfire pummeled the walls around me.

“That’s not what we’re here for,” I rasped into the mike, my eyes locked on my wounded prey. “I’ve got to try and—”

“—and what,” Munro rasped, “carry him out? What, are you Superman now?” A long burst ripped through my comms set, like a jackhammer to my eardrums, then his manic voice came back. “Just cap the sonofabitch, Reilly. Do it. You heard what he’s done. ‘It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin,’ remember? That’s the scumbag you’re worried about wasting? You happy to let him loose, is that gonna be your contribution to making this world a better place? I don’t think so. You don’t want that on your conscience, and I don’t either. We came here to do a job. We have our orders. We’re at war, and he’s the enemy. So stop with the righteous bullshit, pop the bastard, and get your ass out here. I ain’t waiting any longer.”

His words were still ricocheting inside my skull as another volley of bullets raked the back wall of the lab. I dove to the floor as wood splinters and glass shards rained down around me, and took cover behind one of the lab’s cabinets. I flicked a quick glance across at the scientist. Munro was, again, right. There was no way we could take him with us. Not given his injury. Not given the small army of coke-fueled banditos bearing down on us.

Dammit, it wasn’t supposed to go down this way.

It was meant to be a swift, surgical extraction. Under cover of darkness, me, Munro, and the six other combat-ready guys that rounded off our OCDETF strike team—that’s the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, a federal program that drew on the resources of eleven agencies, including my own FBI and Munro’s DEA— were supposed to sneak into the compound, find McKinnon, and bring him out. Him and his research, that is. Straightforward enough, especially the sneaking in part. The thing is, the mission had been ordered up hastily, after McKinnon’s unexpected call. We hadn’t had much time to plan it, and the intel we were able to put together on the remote drug lab was sketchy, but I thought we still had decent odds. For one, we were well equipped—sound- suppressed submachine guns, night vision scopes, Kevlar. We had a surveillance drone hovering overhead. We also had the element of surprise. And we’d been pretty successful in raiding other labs since we’d first arrived in Mexico four months earlier.

Quick in and out, nice and clean.

Worked like a charm for the in part of the plan.

Then McKinnon sprang his eleventh-hour surprise on us, caused Munro to go apeshit, got hit in the thigh, and screwed up the out part.

I could now hear frantic shouts in Spanish. The banditos were closing in.

I had to make a move. Any longer and I’d be captured, and I didn’t have any illusions about what the outcome of that would be. They’d torture the hell out of me. Partly for info, partly for fun. Then they’d bring out the chainsaw and prop my head in my lap for a photo op. And the worst part of it is, my noble death would all be for nothing. McKinnon’s work would live on. In infamy, by all indications.

Munro’s voice crackled back to life, blaring deep inside my skull. “All right, screw it. It’s on your head, man. I’m outta here.”

And right then, my mind tripped.

It was like a primeval determination bypassed all the resistance that was innate to me and brushed aside everything that was part and parcel of who I was as a human being and just took control. I watched, out-of-body- experience-like, as my hand came up, all smooth and robotic, lined up the shot right between McKinnon’s terrified eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

The scientist’s head snapped back as a dark mess splattered the cabinet behind him, then he just toppled to one side, a lifeless mound of flesh and bone.

There was no need for a confirmation tap.

I knew it was final.

My gaze lingered on the fallen man for a long second, then I rasped, “I’m coming out,” into my mike. I took a deep breath, popped the strikers off two incendiary grenades and lobbed them at the pistoleros who were hunting me down, then sprang to my feet, laying down a wall of gunfire behind me as I bolted toward the exit. I stopped at the back door of the lab, took one last look at the place, then I burst out of there as the whole place went up in flames behind me.

III

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA SIX MONTHS AGO

In his corner office on the twentieth floor of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building, Hank Corliss stared at his monitor and continued to grind over the latest morsel of background information he’d unearthed. Then he leaned back, swiveled his chair around so he could face the window, and frowned at his trembling fingers.

It’s him.

Again.

Corliss clenched his fists, tight, and took in some long, deep breaths, trying to corral the fury that was galloping through him.

I have to do something.

I have to put an end to this.

I have to make him pay.

His knuckles were bone-white.

Corliss—the Special Agent in Charge of the LA field division of the DEA and the OCDE task force’s executive director—turned and glanced at the plasma screen that sat on the shelves across from his desk. Four days later, coverage of the recent outrage was still all over the airwaves, although it had now degenerated from the endless, repetitive loops that cable news networks somehow managed to thrive on into even more mindless and less relevant peripheral pieces.

He blew out a weary sigh and adjusted his posture, feeling a familiar pain lighting up in his spine. He shut his eyes to try to push it back and mulled over what he’d just read.

The attack had taken place up the coast from Corliss’s office, at the Schultes Ethnomedicine Institute. Overlooking the rolling surf thirty miles northwest of Santa Barbara, the institute was a state-of-the-art research center that was devoted to finding new cures for all kinds of diseases—or, to put it more accurately, to uncovering old cures that had eluded the modern world. Its researchers—physicians, pharmacologists, botanists, microbiologists, neurobiologists, linguists, anthropologists, and oceanographers, among others—roamed the globe, “bioprospectors” seeking out isolated indigenous tribes, spending time with them, and ingratiating themselves to their medicine men in the hope of prying from them the ancient treatments and cures they’d been handed down over generations. It was home to a world-class collection of MDs and PhDs who were great outdoorsmen and adventurers in addition to being outstanding scientists, real-life Indiana Joneses whose survival skills came in handy when it came to trekking deep into Amazonian rainforests or climbing up to oxygen-starved villages high in the Andes.

Their survival skills hadn’t been too useful that fateful Monday.

At around ten A.M., two SUVs had driven up to the institute’s entrance gate. The security guard manning it had been shot dead. The SUVs had carried on into the facility unchallenged and pulled up outside one of its main labs. A half-dozen armed men had coolly marched into the building, shot up the place with snub-nosed machine guns, grabbed two research scientists, and whisked them away. Another guard had, by sheer coincidence, stumbled upon them as they were coming out. In the gunfight that ensued, the guard, as well as a resident who got caught in the crossfire, had been killed. Three other bystanders had been injured, one badly.

The kidnappers, and their victims, were gone. There had been no ransom demands as yet.

Corliss didn’t expect any.

Early speculation from the detectives on the scene was that drug dealers were behind the kidnappings and